The main output from this project is the establishment of the University of Hertfordshire Research Archive. It is described as “.. a showcase of the research produced by the University of Hertfordshire staff (copyright permitting) which is freely available over the web” and ” .. provides a simple interface to enable researchers to self-archive the full text of their published work with just a few quick and easy steps.”

Additional information:

Comments:

The archive/repository appears to be fully functional and contains 2556 items as at 30th January 2007.

“The aim of this Welsh Repository Network (WRN) start-up project bid, run by the University of Wales Aberystwyth (UWA) on behalf of WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum), is to put in place an essential building block for the development of an integrated network of institutional digital repositories in Wales. Currently, just two of the 12 HEIs in Wales have open access digital repositories (Aberystwyth and Cardiff), both of which are pilot rather than production models, lightly populated and resident on shared equipment.

The project aims to run a centrally managed hardware procurement programme designed to provide every HEI in Wales with dedicated and configured repository hardware by the end of 2007 as a major step towards realisation of the WRN. In close collaboration with the technical, organisational and operational support specifically provided for Welsh HEIs within the JISC funded Repository Support Project (RSP), also to be delivered from UWA, this initiative will provide a cost-effective, collaborative and decisive boost to the repository agenda in Wales and help JISC achieve the critical mass of populated repositories and digital content that is a stated objective of the Repositories and Preservation Programme.”

This output will capitalise on RSP, be a milestone in the development of services to make Welsh research and other digital content more accessible, catalyse institutional commitment to open access in Wales, and address the Welsh Assembly Government Reaching Higher agenda.

This report contains details about CISP, the results from the online survey as well as the benefits of assuming an ontology methodology when producing meta-data.

This report has two main goals:

To introduce a new formalism for the description of scientific papers CISP (the Core Information about Scientific Papers);

Attract more attention to ontologies as a valuable methodology for developing metadata.

The report demonstrates the advantages of an ontology methodology for developing metadata by applying it to the analysis of the Dublin Core metadata (DC). An ontology approach allows detecting potential weaknesses in the representation of the DC terms. Such weaknesses include overlap in the semantic meaning between the terms, logically incoherent representation of temporal and spatial relations as well as incoherence in the representation of content. An ontology can also suggest improvements to the DC.
The report describes an ontology methodology to construct CISP metadata about the content of papers. It makes use of an ontology of experiments EXPO proposed at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth as a core ontology, and DOLCE (a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) developed at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, Italy as an upper level ontology.
CISP is a defined set of leaf classes from these ontologies. It includes such key classes as <Goal of investigation>, <Object of investigation>, <Research method>, <Result>, <Conclusion>.

CISP can be used to generate abstracts and summaries of papers and also to facilitate storage and retrieval of information. CISP will constitute the basis for the ART tool. The latter is an authoring tool for the semantic annotation of papers stored in digital repositories. ART is intended for the semi-automatic annotation of data and metadata describing the scientific investigation represented in a research paper. ART will also be able to aid in the expression of research results directly in both a human and machine readable format, through the composition of text using ontology-based templates and stored typical key phrases. .
To find out more about ontology methodology refer to chapters 2 and 3 .
To learn about the proposed CISP metadata you can start reading from chapter 4 onwards.

Summary of contents:
The document provides a thorough outline of the design use and management of IPeLOs (interprofessional e-learning objects).
It includes a section on overarching Reuse Principles, and outline workflows and checklists of critical questions for the supply, manage, and consume processes.

The strategy is for a particular type of formal learning object created specifically for the purpose of reusable sharing.
“IPeLOs are designed and constructed to facilitate reuse. This means they must be, to some extent, generalised. They do not contain information specific to a location, organisation, instructor, time or course. Any inbuilt bias to a region or culture is explicit. They do not contain hyperlinks to URLs which are restricted to particular groups of authorised users.”p4

Comments:
The document provides a researched strategy for the design and creation of formal commissioned LO’s for sharing and reuse.

The success or failure of the strategy is outwith the scope of the document, but it should be clear that this is not intended to be a generic strategy for sharing learning materials nor can it be easily transferred to most extant learning materials.

“The purpose of the Depot is to enable all UK academics to share in the benefits of open access exposure for their research outputs. As part of JISC RepositoryNet, the Depot is provided as a national facility geared to support the policies of UK universities and national funding agencies towards Open Access, aiding policy development in advance of a comprehensive institutional archive network”

The Depot offers the following features:

a re-direct service, nicknamed UK Repository Junction, to ensure that content that comes within the remit of an existing institutional repository is correctly placed.

accepts deposit of e-prints from researchers at institutions that do not currently have an Institutional Repository (IR). The principal target is postprints, that is articles that have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication.

as institutional repositories (IRs) are established, the Depot will support the transfer of relevant content to help populate those new IRs. Meantime, the Depot will act as a keep-safe, notifying institutions when deposits are made.

an OAI-compliant interface, so, like other open access repositories, its contents is available for harvesting, with special attention being paid to ensure that it can searched through the Intute Search, another part of JISC RepositoryNet.

Additional information:

Comments:

I created a Depot account and submitted a test item for the purposes of assessing the repository on the 27th November 2008. The was later removed. My observations following this are:

The repository browse functioned well and was responsive. The repository in general was working well.

Brief project description: A workshop at the OAI5 conference in April 2007 identified a need for improved attribute managed federated access to repositories, and produced a set of requirements. The Federated Access to Repositories (FAR);project would take up this list, and use it to: Create recommendations for attributes to describe authorisation to repositories; where appropriate,;these recommendations will be passed to relevant standards groups Develop extensions to the repository software (EPrints and DSpace) so that it can be used with; Shibboleth and meet these requirements (building on earlier work where this exists) ;Test existing work integrating Shibboleth and Fedora and recommend to developers what will be;needed to meet these requirements ;Install demonstration repositories to show how this can work in practice Feed the modifications and full documentation into the appropriate repository software development process to ensure maintenance through future releases of Eprints and Shibboleth Develop procedures to consider ways of extending federated access management to new functionality introduced into the repository software products following the conclusion of the project A demonstrator of the software will be produced as well as a final version.